


Hear Beyond This Frequency

by LookingForDroids



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sgrub Session, Aradia and Kanaya make brief appearances, Consensual Sex, Dream Bubbles (Homestuck), F/M, Ghosts, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, POV Second Person, The Horrorterrors (Homestuck), The Psiioniic is mentioned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-15 03:01:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29057133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LookingForDroids/pseuds/LookingForDroids
Summary: While clearing out the remnants of the Battleship Condescension, Sollux discovers a prisoner who won’t wake up. Meanwhile, lost in dreams, Feferi suspects her Ancestor isn’t gone for good.
Relationships: Sollux Captor/Feferi Peixes
Comments: 9
Kudos: 6
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 6





	Hear Beyond This Frequency

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Caracalliope](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caracalliope/gifts).



> I was intrigued by the idea of one of them finding the other in a dungeon, but the story quickly veered off in a different direction from that specific prompt. 
> 
> As a quick note, there are some cosmological divergences from canon, namely: dream bubbles existing, and things being possible outside the Game that should not be possible outside the Game.

TA: ok what the fuck

CG: SOLLUX?  
CG: WHAT’S YOUR STATUS? EVERYTHING HAD BETTER BE ALRIGHT DOWN THERE.

TA: iim fiine but you need two 2end kn down here 2tat becau2e ii thiink were goiing two need a mediiculler

CG: OK. FUCK. OK. DON’T TELL ME WE’VE GOT ANOTHER POOR PSYCHIC ASSHOLE TO DEAL WITH, BECAUSE I SWEAR BY EVERY UNHOLY SUPPURATING CANKER ON THE UNIVERSE’S BACKSIDE THAT I AM GOING TO LOSE MY SHIT IF IT’S ANOTHER PSYCHIC ASSHOLE.

TA: 2he2 not a helm2man  
TA: ii thiink that fiishfucker only had the one

CG: SOLLUX, I

TA: 2hut up for a 2econd  
TA: kk  
TA: ii thiink 2he2 an heiire22

==> Be the dreaming princess

These nights you spend more time underwater than you do on the surface.

It’s quiet here. You miss the ripple of moonlight on the waves, but the clarity of air is painful. It stings your eyes and dries your gills, so you dive down deep, to where your mother’s hum fills the water and her white tendrils weave a net about you. You’re safe here. _She’s_ on the surface, and she can’t reach you. That’s important. Whatever happens, you know you cannot let her reach you. You hide while she hunts, practicing stillness, and moment by moment, hour by hour, time passes you by.

When the change comes, you feel it as a ripple through the ocean, a shockwave chased by a passing shadow. A moment later, a noise resounds from the depths: a cry of sorrow, so low and so encompassing that you perceive it more as pressure than sound. Not the final cry. Not yet. You wrap your arms around the span of a tentacle as thick as your waist, lay your head next to a blinking amber eye and sing back across a dark ocean, calming, until the grief-song ends.

As the echoes fade, a thought rises: it might be safe to return. She’s gone – isn’t she? There’s no other reason your mother would mourn.

==> Aradia: Assist

TA: there wa2 some kiinda fuckiing crown on her  
TA: ky2 2cared iit wa2 a mii2take two take iit off  
TA: 2he2 worriied there2 damage

AA: i see.

TA: 2o are your voiice2 telliing you anythiing? you know miine are u2ele22  
TA: oh hey let me ju2t 2hove thii2 eatiing uten2iil iin thii2 2ocket that2 gonna end well  
TA: maybe ii 2hould go hug a drone  
TA: not exactly 2trategiically valuable iintel ii2 what iim 2ayiing

AA: they say shes dreaming 0_0

TA: better than pandead ii gue22  
TA: 2tiill not great for wakiing her royal a22 up

AA: s0llux...  
AA: d0 y0u remember the dreams we used to have?

TA: ii mean that2 over ii2nt iit?  
TA: ii 2topped dreamiing when  
TA: you know

AA: it isnt 0ver  
AA: y0u ch0se t0 st0p

TA: ii cant exactly unchoose

AA: sleep with a d0uble d0se 0f s0p0r t0day  
AA: ill intercede 0n y0ur behalf

TA: iintercede wiith who?

AA: d0es it matter?  
AA: if i get y0u there then y0u can wake the heiress  
AA: but d0nt interfere with my dream self  
AA: its where it needs t0 be

TA: aa

AA: 0r perhaps i sh0uld say tw0 bee  
AA: im fine s0llux really  
AA: bee patient 0_0

TA: eheheh that wa2 terriible  
TA: thank2

==> Sollux: Wake up

You open your eyes to violet light that seems to come from everywhere at once, illuminating a spherical block you haven’t seen before. You remember that light, though, and this architecture. You’re in the city again. The dark one, with its chains and dim blacklight radiance. Going to sleep felt like fighting through fog that thickened around you, but now that you’re here, everything seems clearer than it was, sharp around the edges. You’re not sure if you feel like an infiltrating enemy or like you never belonged anywhere else.

You’re lying on a slab of cracked stone – one of six in circular arrangement. Four are empty. On the last, Aradia lies sleeping, her arms folded over a thorax that rises and falls in the placid rhythm of someone only sleeping. You look away fast. She told you not to mess with her, and you won’t, but it hurts to see her living and whole. Renewed grief and renewed hope feel too similar sometimes, and you’re not going to stay here longer than you have to.

You rise from the platform, easy as breathing. You’d forgotten what it was like to fly without psionics, how different it feels and how natural. You’re not lifting the paltry weight of your body with your mind. Your body is weightless.

It’s stupidly easy to find your way from the depths of the moon to the surface. All you need to do is feel which direction gravity is pulling you, and go the opposite. Your path is a winding one, up flights of spiral stairs and through purple corridors you almost remember, startling a sleepy chess guy guard with a magazine as you zoom past and out from a tower window to float beneath open sky. 

There you stop, uncertain. Aradia might have been able to tell you where you need to go from here, if she was with you. All you can do is stare like an idiot across the expanse of roofs and towers, and out into the empty void, and –

Oh, shit. Oh, holy shit.

The void isn’t empty. 

_Intercede with who?_ you think, in the blank and panicked space between seeing the thing and almost comprehending it. Concepts stutter through your mind: huge; dark; _close_ , and somehow, simultaneously, astronomically distant. There are tentacles, a vast snarl of them, twisting and untwisting in impossible knots; there are beaks and maws and _way_ too many teeth. And there’s a voice that presses down like a weight on your thinkpan, growing heavier and more thunderous the more you let yourself listen:

_granddaughter-ours-find-lost-dreaming-find-return-her_

The message bores into your mind with migraine intensity, more thought than speech and more pressure than thought. You feel a trickle of blood running down from your sniffnode with the distracted calm of watching something happen to a character on-screen. _Granddaughter,_ whatever that means. With everything you’ve heard about the Imperial lusus, it should probably freak you out more than it does, but there’s insufficient room in your mind for a freakout. You don’t have the fucking bandwidth. Through the flood of psychic noise, you project back as hard as you can, _Where?_

The dripping darkness writhes. A tendril extends down towards you, eyes blinking along its length, then curls back on itself and points outward into the abyss. 

_OK,_ you promise, _I’ll do it, OK,_ until the pressure behind your eyes recedes enough to let you think.

Speed doesn’t matter so much, Aradia told you. Direction matters. So does intent, and you’ve got both. You launch yourself into the dark along the trajectory the horrorterror set, and you know better than to deviate from your course. 

The purple towers of the city fall away behind you. The knot of tentacles and eyes draws back to let you pass, and your thinkpan rings with fading echoes as the voice falls silent. Time and space slide by, to whatever degree those variables can even be quantified out here, and as you fly, you realize that there are more than monsters around you. Scattered spheres float there like soap bubbles in a lightless sea, their colors moving beneath an iridescent surface film. Sometimes you’re close enough to see the vague shape of what they hold, cities and wilderness in patchwork miniature. Some are built from pieces you recognize, a tree’s scalemate-gallows branches or the shape of a skyline; others are as alien as they are unfamiliar, but you can wonder about the brain-trees later, and the red desert of statues with their torches and the rings of horns all the way around their heads. They’re not what you’re looking for now.

You don’t know what you’re looking for, exactly, but when a bubble rises before you in a swirl of sea colors, blues and greens and greys, you don’t turn aside. It’s small at first, just a marble turning in the palm of the void, but it soon grows close enough to fill the field of your vision, then close enough to touch. The soap-film stretches, then breaks, and you plunge down into a cold and endless ocean.

The cold hits first, an encompassing shock. Your flight falters at the sudden resistance of water where there had been only vacuum, and brine rushes in to sting your eyes and fill your mouth. Fear chokes you until you remember – you’re dreaming. You don’t need to breathe. It’s not so easy to make your body believe it, and everything about being submerged sends danger signals flashing. You grew up knowing that the ocean is inimical to survival, and you want to escape back out into the dark, but you can’t.

It’s a sea-troll you’re looking for. This is where you need to be.

==> Feferi: Ascend

You knew the way back once.

You’re not sure you remember it. Trying calls you back to places you don’t want to be, and things it’s easier to leave behind: the bare cell where she kept you, the tines of a trident scraping against bone, the pain of fighting against what can’t be fought. You wounded her sometimes. There’s comfort in that. In the arena, before she defeated you, you pierced her through the abdomen before the assembled gaze of all her nervous courtiers. When they brought you to her alive and in chains, you laid her arm open to the bone with your teeth, then gave her a fuchsia-tinged grin from your place on the floor, your mouth thick with the taste of her blood and yours. You thought you were only meant for entertainment, for a while.

Maybe, for a while, you were. The rebels changed things; you weren’t supposed to see how nervous she was when she first tried to put the tiara on you. You fought that time too, and kept on fighting until you realized what she wanted, and then you fled. Your body, somewhere, is nonresponsive and perfectly useless. As long as your mind can elude her, you won’t be what she needs.

 _Is_ she gone?

The ocean of your dreams isn’t empty. Shadows move above you, and there are currents that hint at a predator’s motion. You still feel hunted. But this time, you hold the dream of a trident in your hand.

The light changes as you rise, from lightless black to indigo, and the landscape takes on definition and form. One moment, there’s nothing but the abyss where your dreams intersect with your mother’s home; the next, the continental shelf slopes gradually upward, close enough for the sun to feed the seaweed drifting in waves. These are places you’ve visited before, jumbled together and blurring at the edges, the caves you used to camp in with Eridan sitting side by side with the salt-rimed wrecks where you looked for trinkets and interesting bones. You’re in the shallows now, where jeweled cuttlefish dart and play; nowhere in the sea is safe, but in your childhood you were the most dangerous thing in these waters, and you chose to be kind.

There’s a second ripple of change, in the sea or in the dream. A smaller one, this time, unaccompanied by mourning. Something arcs through the water far above you – a bright thing, a flash of red and blue descending like a meteor – and you duck into the shadow of a ship’s sunken hull, watching, waiting. If it’s here for you, it doesn’t see you yet. You rise from the wreck in a burst of speed, your trident raised, your muscles trembling to aim and throw. Not yet. No need to kill just yet. The tendrils of your hair entangle the darting thing as you rush past, coiling tight and holding fast around arms and legs too substantial to be only light. It struggles instinctively, like a fish in a net, then stills as it sees you.

It’s a troll you’ve caught, and not the one you’ve been fearing. He’s angular and thin, fragile if you ignore the hum of latent power that surrounds him, but ignoring that would be a mistake. This ocean is _yours_ , and he’s out of place here – but as a stranger, you think, not an enemy. His presence doesn’t bother you, and as you hang in the water in front of him, you realize why. 

You’ve seen that face before, on another of your Ancestor’s prisoners. The price of defiance, she’d said, tracing a claw almost tenderly along his jaw, and the message was clear: she could keep you alive as long as she needed you. She could always make it worse. But the troll you see now is free, and he looks younger, without the exhaustion ground into every line of his face. His eyes burn like lamps in the darkness, a red-blue flicker, and when he sees you, he isn’t afraid.

“Psiioniic?” you ask. He shakes his head and stares at you, those strange eyes gone wide with wordless shock.

==> Sollux: Make the acquaintance of royalty

The Heiress isn’t a ghost, even in her own mind. Her eyes are bright with life and fuchsia-tinted, and she’s wary, even as her hair slips from around your wrists and leaves you free. Her resemblance to the Condesce is inescapable, but it’s the differences that you notice. Her face is rounder, her horns shorter, her mouth softer and not yet so cruel. There are bruised shadows beneath her eyes. You wonder how she knew Psii – and his name, you think, not his sick parody of a commission, not his serial number. You already like her a little more than any lowblood should like a fishtroll just for that.

You like her smile, too, the one she gives you when she realizes you’re no enemy, that flash of dangerous teeth without threat. Now is not the time or place for finger guns, but you cannot deny you’re tempted. It’s the memory of what she looked like in the cell that stops you, because she doesn’t need your hoofbeastshit now. You tilt your head toward the surface, and she nods, quick enough on the uptake not to ask you to speak underwater. She kicks into motion again, her trident clutched loosely in one hand and her long hair swirling behind her, and you follow without hesitation.

It’s a strange journey, silent and wary. Instead of your short arc through open water, she picks her path through terrain that blurs and blends with dreamlike inconstancy, along sheltering ravines and through the deep, swaying green of kelp forests. She pulls you to a halt sometimes and floats motionless, her head tilted and her fins fluttering, alert for something you can’t sense. At first, you think it’s only residual fear, well-justified but no longer needed. You can’t deny you’re on edge, but there doesn’t seem to be anything dangerous here. Moonlight filters down through the water in dancing beams of green and fuchsia, and as you draw near to the surface, blue bioluminescence drifts with the waves. This doesn’t feel like the kind of dream that turns into a daymare, but the Heiress’s touch on your arm is warning, and after a moment, you see why. As you watch, a shadow passes beneath the moons – lithe, slender, its hair a tangle of ink.

You freeze, but the Heiress moves, digging her claws into your arm and pulling you back into the shadow of a crevice. Her grip is painfully tight, and _now_ she looks afraid. 

She’s not the only one. You know that silhouette. You fought her on the deck of the Battleship Condesce, you and Aradia’s ghost with backup from a psionic squadron, and all of you together almost lost. You blasted her to particles in the end, but you should have known that dead didn’t mean gone.

The Condesce’s shadow circles back, wavering and limned in fuchsia and green. Can she scent you, like finbeasts scent blood? You don’t know, but you’re certain, suddenly, that she knows you’re here. The way she moves is just that slow, that confident. Energy buzzes along your nerves, potential that you hold by force in check. Anything electric would be a mistake here. You’re not sure what would happen to you or the Heiress if you fried yourself in a dream, but you know for a fact that you don’t want to test it. Best case scenario, you wake up and leave a problem unresolved. Worst case – 

Last resort, you think. You’re not averse to a blaze of glory, but you don’t like the thought of Karkat and Aradia wondering why you didn’t come back.

The Heiress tenses at your side, her claws clenching around her trident’s haft. Her fins are flared in defensive display, and you think for a moment that she’s going to go for a blaze of glory all her own. Then she looks at you, and something changes in her face. There’s no time to figure out what before she grabs your hand and drags you back the way you came.

In a rippling motion, the Condesce’s shadow turns and follows you into the depths. She’s fast. There’s no way she was that fast in life. Even with the burn of psionic flight, you’re not sure you can be faster. Clutching the Heiress’s hand, you dive into the silence of underwater pursuit. You don’t waste time looking behind you, but the back of your cranial support column itches with the certainty that she’s closing distance.

Something flashes past you through the water as you descend: a coiling tentacle, long and luminous, lusus-white. Another joins it, and a third; soon, you’re swimming through a waving forest of them. You recoil reflexively, but the Heiress only swims alongside the things, running her hand over the nearest with familiar fondness.

 _Holy fuck,_ you think, in reverent terror. _That’s her guardian._ You can’t even see what the tentacles connect to. You only know that it must be far away, and huge. And there’s a sound filling the water all around you, a low reverberant hum that makes your pan ache and your hair stand on end. The Heiress hums her own tuneless, low frequency murmur in reply, like a single bumblebee buzzing counterpoint to the overwhelming noise of a hive. It’s eerie as hell, but it calms you; it’s nice to know the biggest monster is on your side. When you steal a glance over your shoulder, a net of pale tendrils intertwines behind you, blocking the way back. The Condesce moves just beyond them, swimming along the barrier, seeking a gap and finding none. Still, the Heiress pulls you down and down. 

Just as the last light from above fades, leaving only your psionic glow, the dream ocean shifts. The currents change around you; light floods your eyes, and then, without warning, gravity reverses as you break the surface of a pool. You’re breathing air, flailing ungracefully as the Heiress reaches down to pull you up onto cold stone. For a moment, all you can do is lie there shivering, disoriented by the change, remembering that your bellowsacs exist to pull in air and listening to the waves crash somewhere out of sight. You feel someone lift and carry you with effortless strength, and you open your eyes an Heiress propping you up against the black rock wall of a sea cave.

The first words you say are, “Have we lost her?”

“I don’t know,” the Heiress says; she’s shivering too, and there’s no way it’s from the cold. “I’d hoped she was dead.”

“She is extremely fucking dead,” you say. “I guess we should have known she’d be too much of an unholy terror to let that stop her.”

The Heiress leans forward, hands on her knees, watching you with unnervingly forthright interest. She could break you in half with her hands, if she’s anything like her Ancestor. You wonder whether she will be. Maybe it was a mistake, searching her out like this and bringing her back, but you don’t think so. When you remember the way you found her, locked in a tiny cell with cracks in her carapace and that fucking tiara on her head, it’s hard to care whether it’s a mistake or not.

“Who _are_ you, anywhale?” she asks. 

_Did she really just...?_ you think, and yeah, she did. That was definitely a pun. You guess some habits are hard to break, and it’s not like she’s any less dangerous than she ever was, but it’s hard not to be charmed.

“Sollux Captor. Vantas’s lieutenant. I’m... heh. Remember that poor sucker you thought I was? I’m his Descendant.”

“Did you find him, then?” she asks. “Is he free?”

She grabs your hands as she speaks, with no guile and no pause for calculation. Her grip is painfully tight until she sees you wince, and then she releases you, and the thing that surprises you most about all of it is that you’re not surprised at all. You’d heard rumors that this Heiress was different than some, but all you knew was that she lived in isolation. Even her disappearance was unconfirmed. Strange to think that her caste and yours might have something like that in common.

“Free, sure. Not exactly OK, but I think he will be.” 

You hope so, anyway. You and Kanaya have had luck with rehab before, but dealing with the fucking time-scale on this one is going to be trouble. You’ll have to think about it eventually, but you don’t want to think about it now.

“We found you too,” you say. “In Imperial custody. You weren’t in great shape either.”

“I know,” the Heiress says. “She wanted me to give in. She only knows one way to make that happen.”

She rises and turns away, moving to the back of the cave with restive haste. There’s a sailcloth curtain there, covering what looks like the mouth of a tunnel, and beside it a pile of driftwood kindling stacked in a dry place. This is a memory, you realize. It might even be a happy one.

The Heiress grabs an armful of firewood, looks back at you once, then ducks past the curtain and out of sight. You’re pretty sure it’s an invitation. If it’s not, you figure you’ll find out, and maybe learn something about who she is at the same time. You follow her out to a lonely shore, where brown sand stretches out to either side and Alternian constellations light the skies. You’ve never seen the place, or anything like it – you stayed the hell away from the oceans, like anyone who wasn’t an idiot with a keen interest in getting killed – but the sight of a satellite blinking past overhead leaves you too aware that this is home, and you won’t be back there.

She’s building a firepit in the dunes a little ways up from the wrackline, positioning the firewood in a cone with dried seagrass for tinder. She looks half-wild, with seaweed in her hair and eyes that reflect back the moonlight, but she calls you over with a shout and a wave of her hand – like an equal, a possible friend or an actual one.

“Do the honors?” she asks, with a smile almost mischievous enough to make you forget the way her face had gone blank in the cave, just before she turned away. 

You toss a handful of lightning at the center, and the Heiress claps once as the driftwood crackles into flame. Her face is alight – first with the dissipating glow of your energy, then with simple firelight – and for a moment there’s joy there, unrestrained. There’s no way she hasn’t seen psionics before, but maybe not for anything as harmless as this.

You’ll show her fireworks, you decide, when both of you wake up again: starbursts, pinwheels, scintillating patterns complex enough to wash the Condesce’s existence from her mind. You’d light the sky up here and now, but there’s business to deal with first, and you’re not sure whether you’re out of reach or just hiding.

The Heiress isn’t preparing for an attack at any moment, at least. She’s – calm, maybe, in a way that might not last. No longer smiling. She sits cross-legged in front of the fire, watching the flames with a distant look on her face, and you flop down beside her and fall back against the sand, looking up at remembered stars. It’s not so long ago that the thought of them used to scare you shitless. Now they just feel nostalgic, which you guess means you feel older than any eleven-sweep-old should.

“You think we’re safe here?” you ask. It’s hard to say. You haven’t heard her dying voice, but you haven’t heard _any_ voices since the sea swept over you, and you know as well as she does that death isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a person.

“I don’t think my mom will let her through, but I don’t think we can stay here forever, either. And I wouldn’t if we could,” she says, her voice rising into anger. _Highblood rage,_ you think automatically, but sometimes the automatic response is the wrong one. Her teeth are bared in a snarl, but her claws, digging furrows into the sand, are tense to the point of trembling. It isn’t _highblood_ rage at all.

“I’m _tired_ of this,” she says. “I hate it. I am sick to death of being asleep and being _afraid._ ”

“Heiress,” you say, and she stops, turning towards you. Her hair is tangled, her features half in firelight and half in shadow, and you realize, as the word hangs between you, that it should be _Empress_ now. You almost say that, but she shakes her head, and you keep your shout tunnel shut and wait.

“Feferi,” she says. Her voice is quiet, and her anger isn’t gone, but there’s core of something beneath it that even the Condesce couldn’t reach. Her claws unclench as she says the name. Her expression softens. She’s watching you like you’re a riddle in need of solving, and you know you shouldn’t be thinking about the curve of her mouth or the glint of her teeth, or how close she is right now, or how dangerous. Maybe you shouldn’t be so quick to trust that she’s different from the nobles you fought against, the ones who were always kind until they turned casually cruel. But you can’t help remembering the feeling of her hand in the dark, or what she looked like when she let her guard fall and you startled her into happiness.

“Feferi,” you say. “Question. Real question, not just me being an asshole. You’re in our medblock, and KN got rid of the freaky mind-control crown. You’re not pan-fried. Why not just wake up?”

“Because she needs to be gone.”

==> Heiress: Face your legacy

 _She needs to be gone._

You’re startled by the words, and by how calm you are when you speak them. You thought it would be a confession of fear that that spilled from your mouth, or at your bravest, the kind of furious, twisted-up hate that leaves wanting a violent end to everything. But now, with the waves crashing and the taste of salt heavy in the air, it feels like all of that’s been washed away, leaving you scoured-out and empty. There’s a mission you didn’t finish, and now you can. It’s that simple.

“This is my dream. She’s my Ancestor. It was always going to be her or me.”

“Us,” Sollux says, like it was never even in question. “Electrokinesis underwater is angling for a Troll Darwin Award, assuming you can even die in dreams, but – ”

He doesn’t realize what he’s said, but a warning frisson passes up and down your spine. Ghosts are harmless, usually. Without a psychic to summon them, all they can do is rage. But you and your Ancestor are identical down in the structure of your DNA, and overlapping in mind, with the tiara’s influence – and an empty vessel can be filled.

“I _reel_ ly don’t think it would be a good idea for me to die in this one,” you say.

“OK, blasting her out of the water is out,” he says. “So we come up with a different plan. You thought I was the Psiioniic. Think she’d make the same mistake?”

 _No,_ you want to say. What you think is that you don’t want anyone in danger for your sake, but if you told him that, you’re sure he’d say he isn’t only doing it for you. The Condesce needs to die and stay dead. You’re both agreed on that point – and on something else too, a conviction you’d formed on the arena floor and tempered in a prison cell, waiting for your Ancestor to attend you: there needs to be no Empress at all.

You don’t know how it will work without one. You’ve heard that Vantas has some ideas; from what you saw in those final nights, they scared and intrigued the Condesce almost as much as his blood did, but she always spent so much time caught up in the past. There’s a vicious, pleasing irony in the thought that her inability to leave it might be what kills her.

“I think she might,” you say. “She’s compromised.”

“If I compromise her further, maybe you can take her out while she’s distracted.”

It won’t be as easy as that, but you think he knows it. Neither she nor you will die from a single blow, no matter how well-struck. A psionic explosion might do it, but that would have a price you can’t ask of anyone except yourself. But you can weaken her, and with luck, that will be enough.

“Maybe,” you say. “But if I do die, or she captures me, don’t try to fight her.”

“Like hell – ”

“No. This is important. If she wins, you need to escape.” You swallow hard, and force yourself to say it. “Your friends need to know not to trust whatever wakes up.”

You see the quick little nod he gives you as understanding sinks in, and the acceptance. If he’s a rebel, he’ll have made decisions like that before, and that makes you angry too, because nobody should have to. You’re suddenly glad that your Ancestor never forced you to kill any of his comrades; she wanted you all to herself, and that hurt sometimes, when she was in her blacker moods, but it kept the blood off your claws. Now, you take his hands and hold them loosely, feeling the fast-burning heat of his unarmored palms, the slight static buzz of power. You don’t want to hurt him. You want to keep him from being hurt. It feels important to be sure of that.

“It will be a victory,” you say. “As long as she doesn’t outlive me.”

“That’s bullshit,” he says, “but fine.”

He curls his thin fingers around yours and squeezes tightly, and you know he understands.

“Shoal-lux,” you say, testing the pun; a brief smile flashes across his face in response, and he glances up from your joined fingers to meet your eyes. You recognize the look on his face, in the instant before he schools it into neutrality: a little bit awestruck, a little fascinated, something in the slant of his mouth that’s not quite innocent but close enough. It’s suddenly easy to imagine taking his face in your hands and kissing him, feeling his salt-stiff hair between your claws as you push him down against the sand. Maybe you just want something to chase away the taste of Tyrian blood, but maybe, you think, it’s him you want, _speseafically_. He’s sweet. It’s been a long time since your life has been anything but bitter.

You think he’d let you, too. You think it probably wouldn’t even be a matter of _letting._

You almost ask. Almost. What you say instead is, “You krilled an empress before.”

He gives you an odd look, like he can guess and doesn’t like what you’re thinking.

“Sure,” he says. “Professional regicide at your service.”

“If you had to, would you do it again?”

“That’s kind of the plan here.”

“No,” you say. “I mean...”

“If I had to,” he says, and holds your hand a little tighter. It’s hard to say which is more of a comfort. You watch the flames and let yourself be content with both.

“Hey, FF?” he says, and it’s your turn to try to read what he isn’t saying. You like the sound of your name like that, in his voice, shortened and redoubled. You like a lot of things about him.

“You’re not like her.”

“You sound awfully confindent aboat that.”

He shrugs. “I’m good at working from available data.”

You think about that, and about the heat of his palm against yours, and then you do something that might be a mistake. You kiss the back of his hand – carefully, formally, like they do in movies set in older times. He’s warm and staticky, and you can taste salt and seawater on him, and something like the air after lightning. You hear his breath catch – not in fear – and turn his hand over to press your lips to his palm, and his wrist. Then you look up, wondering what happens next. His face is flushed gold. The tip of his tongue darts out to touch his lips – it’s forked, you see, and you have to look away to keep from staring.

“Can I,” he asks. “I mean, do you want to – ”

You’re not sure all of what he’s asking. It doesn’t matter. You say yes.

He leans forward, close enough to kiss, and you pull him closer still, your palm splayed against thin violet fabric still wet from the sea. His hand settles on your hip as his mouth meets yours, rushed, a little clumsy; your teeth catch at his lip, more accident than design, and the noise he makes doesn’t sound like pain. You want more of it. You want all of him. Your thumb brushes the waistband of his pants, slipping between cloth and the ridge of a chitin plate, and you hesitate long enough for him to hear what you’re not asking. 

He doesn’t answer in words. Not immediately. He falls back against the dunes, tugging you along with him until you’re propped on your elbows with your hips pressed to his, laughter rising in your throat until there’s no room left for fear or fury. His legs wrap around your waist, and you rock down instinctively; when your bulge slips out to curl heavy against the inside of your skirt, you know he can feel it.

“Yes,” he breathes, “hell yes, like this,” and you stop worrying about anything but how he feels beneath you.

You pull back long enough to divest him of clinging, seawater-stained pants, revealing angular hips shadowed by firelight and psionic sparks, a scarred abdomen and the coiling tips of two emerging bulges. You feel him shiver at your claws on his unprotected inner thighs, at the touch of fingertips that come away wet with traces of genetic material, and the sight of him sprawled there with his glowing eyes half-closed leaves your mouth dry and your nook aching. 

He doesn’t hide the way he’s looking, either, when you rise to let your own skirt fall around your ankles, or when you kneel between his parted legs with your hands on his shoulders. Then you’re pressing him down again, letting your weight settle over him, feeling him arch up as you push slowly in.

There’s no need to move, so you hold him still, except for the slight tidal roll of his hips, the feverish clench and release of his fingers and his nook when you clasp his hands and pin them at his sides. His bulges twist against your abdomen, tangling with each other and the hem of your shirt, hotter and more fragile than the rest of him. You think about taking them in your mouth or your hands, letting them twine around your fingers, and maybe you will – if there’s time, if you live – but right now, you like the line of his body, the arc of his spine, the way you can feel how his breathing changes. His head falls back when you kiss his throat, and you hear your name in his voice again, two letters hissed shaky into the air. He clutches your hands when he paints you in gold, and doesn’t let go until you press your face into the salt-scented curve of his shoulder and come with a muffled cry, your thighs trembling as you stain the sand beneath you. 

When the last wave of it passes, you roll so he can rest on top of you, his head tucked beneath your chin and one leg slipped easily between your own. It doesn’t bother you to feel the slurry drying on your skin, his and yours mingled. It won’t last, anyway, for longer than you can keep your mind on it. It’s all just dreaming, and you don’t mind dreaming of this for a little longer.

You like him. You don’t know if there’s any more to this than that, and maybe a bit of stolen pleasure before an uncertain end, but that doesn’t have to matter now. The quiet is abiding, but comfortable. You listen to the waves, and to an almost-stranger’s measured breathing, and in the lull between battles, you let yourself rest.

==> Sollux: Be the bait

There’s no morning on this beach, and no evening, but time passes anyway, without regard for minor considerations like giving anybody a fucking break. You waited as long as you could, resting with your head on Feferi’s shoulder and watching the flames burn low, wondering whether, if you went back to that cavern, you’d find the driftwood stacked just as it was before. Does anything _change_ , in this bubble? 

It doesn’t matter. One way or another, you won’t be sticking around for long.

Feferi’s down by the shore now, with the wind from the dunes tangling in her hair and small waves washing around her ankles. You wouldn’t mind hanging back just to watch her a little longer, because – in the words of the scholars of old – _dat ass,_ and also those hips, framed by a bright green and blue skirt, and the imposing vision of her horns and her trident. But you’re here for a reason, and you’re not going to let yourself put this off any longer.

“Ready?” she asks, when you light down beside her.

“Ready.”

Your job is easy. It scares you, but it’s easy. You’re wearing the memory of someone else’s clothing – not the flight suit, but a robe the color of sand that Feferi saw once in a forbidden book, cinched about the waist with a belt bearing your sign and your Ancestor’s. You hope it’s accurate, because while you don’t doubt there is one, right now you can’t think of a more embarrassing reason than bad cosplay for a mission to fail.

Feferi’s claw-tips brush your face as she pulls the hood up over your horns, in a gesture that’s simultaneously almost pale and not pale at all. Your face goes hot at the sensation and the memories, and at the way she’s looking at you, like she’s got something she wants to say and doesn’t quite know how. You move into her orbit, and she kisses you like she’s afraid of something ending. It starts careful. It doesn’t stay that way. Her claws curl in your borrowed cloak as you drag each other close, and then you’re pressed up against her in the surf, your hands gripping her hips, the points of her seadweller teeth sharp against your tongue. If you could, you’d pull her back to the dunes and the remnants of the fire, but you step back, because there’s no delaying any further. It’s time for you to do this thing.

The Psiioniic’s robe clings to your legs as you walk into the waves, taking on the weight and chill of water. When you’re up past your waist, you look back at Feferi standing on the shore, her hand raised in farewell, and now, you think, _now_ is the time for finger guns. She cracks a grin at the gesture. You turn and dive before you can watch it fade.

The water closes over you, and so does the muffled quiet of the ocean. It feels like you’re in a different world, blue and green and thick with glittering silt. Without Feferi to guide you, you don’t have a clue where you’re going, but that’s OK; you’re pretty sure that as long as you keep going forward, the strange geography of the bubble will take care of the rest. You don’t have a destination. If this works, the troll you’re looking for will eventually find you.

The journey back seems shorter than you remember, but maybe that’s only because you know what to expect: first the shallows, bleeding seamlessly into the darkness of the deep ocean as you swim further out, and then the many luminous arms of Feferi’s lusus. You move past them as they sway around you, brushing close on either side. One grazes your face once, with a cold and weirdly raspy touch, but draws back when you recoil. It’s only curious, you think. It’s unsettling all the same. 

OK, it’s fucking terrifying. But that’s all it is – a prickle on the back of your neck, the awareness that you’re small and look like prey. Nothing seizes you as you pass; when you reach the living net separating Feferi from her Ancestor’s ghost, the tendrils twist apart to let you leave, and nothing reaches out to catch your ankle and drag you back. And then you’re through, and out again in open ocean, feeling obscurely like you now owe a debt of gratitude to two horrorterrors instead of just one. That’s just your life now, you guess, and at least you managed to land on the right number. You’ll take it.

You’re swimming through a thicket of pale cold water coral when you notice that you’ve picked up a shadow.

At first you think it must be Feferi, just out of reach but just in sight when you turn your glowing eyes quick enough through the deep-sea dark, following somewhere behind you. It doesn’t attack, just watches from a distance, flitting from one sheltering ridge of rock to another. But you pause to pretend that you’re examining the labyrinthine branches of a coral colony, and when you turn away again, the figure waiting behind you is taller and leaner, spikier, more spectral silhouette than troll. Still more defined than she was when you last saw her, which is maybe the most worrying thing you’ve seen in a life that now includes getting up close and personal with the emissary of the Furthest Ring. You can’t help remembering that Aradia found writing on a temple wall once that called Her Imperious Condescension the Thief of Life; now, with her spirit playing the infiltrator in her Heiress’s mind, you _do not_ want to know how literal she can make that.

Almost lazily, the Condesce circles closer, considering you from all angles. Your bloodpusher kicks into overdrive. Your sympathetic nervous system makes a screaming doomed attempt to hijack the rest of your body and get the hell out, but fuck that idea forever. You hold your position. And then, because you’re an idiot with a mission and it’s time to find out exactly how compromised she is, you hold out a hand, palm up, in invitation.

She’s almost gentle when her claws close around your wrist. You're not expecting that. It almost reminds you of Feferi when she first caught you, after she saw you and before she let you go. But Feferi had been acting out of fear, and the Condesce – you’re not sure what the Condesce is thinking now.

She looks insubstantial up close, more absence than presence. She’s solid enough, but the red and blue of your eyes shines through her. You’re not sure how much of her is left, or whether her current silence is mindlessness or just inability to make her voice heard. Maybe Aradia would be able to tell you for certain. But it seems to you that there’s intelligence in the blank fuchsia gleam of her eyes, and intent in the way she cups your face, tracing a claw with rapt attention over the bone beneath one eye. You’ve heard the rumors about what went on in that helmsblock – everyone has – and you can imagine her voice, the rich amusement edged with proprietary fondness: _Miss me, buoy?_

Or maybe she isn’t fooled and doesn’t care, because one pretty psionic toy is as good as any other. You don’t really care either. You tilt your chin up, showing your throat, and let her feel the way you’re trembling as you press your face against her hand. 

One of her legs hooks around one of yours. Sharp teeth brush your ear.

After that, it happens fast.

Something moves through the water in a brilliant blur: flowing skirts, black hair, the flash of a trident tearing through the Condesce’s side. The Condesce releases you and spins to give chase, leaving you buffeted by the currents swirling in her wake.

Feferi is already swimming back to meet her, weaving through the water with teeth bared in a silent snarl, all the old wariness subsumed by a violence that you never saw when she caught you. Even the shadows around her seem different, writhing and twisting like horrorterror tentacles as Heiress and Empress clash. There’s blood. There are teeth. Even if you wanted to take a chance with eye-beams or lightning, you couldn’t, because they’re so close and so fast that there’s no hitting one without catching the other. So you just float there, your bloodpusher hammering double-time as you wait for an opening, or a signal, or the moment when you have to keep the promise you’ve been fearing.

==> Feferi: Hunt the hunter

Your acid tract has been a knot of anxiety ever since Sollux slipped below the waves. You’re not concerned about losing track of him. Even in this changeable ocean, it’s far too easy to follow the trail of his electric field through the water. But if you can find him like that, so can she, and you hate how much of this plan rests on him not defending himself.

While he’s moving, you keep your distance; when he stops, you hurry on, moving as fast as you can without abandoning stealth. You pause behind a ridge, concealed by white coral, and make yourself wait long enough to assess – he’s there, yes, and not alone. Your Ancestor has found him, but she hasn’t had a chance to hurt him yet. She looms over him, and he makes no move to escape her. You see her touch his face and a cold rage floods you. You know what she does to people. You’re not going to let her do it to him.

You don’t think. You just move. Your trident is light in your hand, and you bring it around as you fly past, aiming for her abdomen, slicing along the along the narrow line between two ghostly chitin plates where the blade-edged point can cut deep. She makes no sound, but you can feel her cutting through the water after you. You’re not afraid. You meet her as you did the first time you fought – fast, aggressive, untouched by the inevitability of defeat. 

You scarcely feel it the first time she wounds you, or the next. You’re too caught up in the furious elation of your chains discarded and your teeth snapping at your enemy’s throat, and pain, though present, feels a long ways away. She lashes at you with shadow claws, adorned with the memory of gold. You knock her arm away with your trident’s haft, dart past and strike at the gap where her shoulder and thorax meet. She’s laughing soundlessly, and you don’t care. But clarity returns with time, and so does the awareness of weakness. You’re slowing. You can feel it. Your blood flows out of your injuries in fuchsia ribbons, diffusing into the water, and cold seeps in to replace it. 

_She_ doesn’t bleed. You slice through her, too shallowly, and the shape of her reforms like fog. But she recoils from the tines of your trident, and when your claws tatter the fabric of her shadow, it stays tattered. This is your Ancestor, your dream, your mind that you’re fighting in and for. Your trident feels heavier than it used to, but you still have strength enough to wield it.

Still, for every jab and slash that hits, another glances off her armor or passes harmlessly through the curling smoke of her hair. If you hadn’t already wounded her deeply, you suspect you’d already be dead. If you were older and stronger – if you’d only had _time_ – the way to do this would be to wear her down piece by piece, but you’re slowing. You’re tiring. A war of attrition isn’t one you can win.

You fall back, grasping for a chance to think. You’ve fought her before. You know how she works. She used to toy with you in the arena, letting you believe you might win until you started flagging, and you wonder if that’s what she’s doing now.

If she is, you can use that arrogance. 

She jabs at you almost lazily, with a blow you could easily parry; you force yourself to move a fraction of a second too slow, and feel the brutal crack of chitin beneath her trident’s point. You flinch the next time you block, and strike back too wildly, without strategy or gain. You dig down for the feeling of being alone and helpless, struggling to rise from the arena floor or pinned against the wall of your cell with fuchsia-painted claws closing around your throat, and you let her see the memory of it in your face. And then you whirl away, seeking distance.

You face each other for an instant across a short span of water, you with your weapon lifted defensively, she with her sleek and predatory smile. Then she lunges, too fast to dodge. That’s alright. You can see in slow-motion the arc of her trident blurring towards you, and you can see the opening she leaves, the gap in her chitin as her arm is lifted. You can’t win and live, but you can win. That’s all you need to do. Just win. Just do that, and it will be enough.

The impact is a searing shock, but you’ve felt pain before; you push through it, and as you feel the three sharp blades impale you, you strike upwards, in a straight line towards her empty bloodpusher.

Sollux is watching as you curl around the pain in your bilesack and your trident hits its mark. The Condesce’s ghost jerks like a speared fish; darkness spills from the wound in her side like ink into water, and you wonder why you were ever so afraid of her, when it was all so simple in the end. He starts toward you, reaching out soundlessly, his mouth half-open in horror. You don’t think he knows what to do, but that doesn’t matter, because you haven’t forgotten. You mouth the word _Go._ You don’t need to beg him. He’s gone in a flash of light.

==> Sollux: Abscond

You burn through the Furthest Ring in a crackle of red-blue lightning.

There’s no point in speed, but you’re pushing your psionics as hard as you can, chasing the hope of exhaustion. Sometimes, bright bubbles flash by and recede as quickly as they arose, and you don’t care about what worlds and memories you might be leaving behind; mostly, you fly through featureless darkness. You have direction and intent. You’ll tell the others, if you have to, that they’ve got a resurrected Empress to deal with – but you don’t think _anything_ will be waking up in Feferi’s medblock any longer. She’s taken care of that herself, and you didn’t even hear her voice warning you it would happen. Maybe you could have changed things, if you had. Probably not, but you never did learn to stop trying.

When you reach the dark moon again, the horrorterror that sent you on your way is still there, floating like a daymarish sentry above the city in its violet splendor. Its central eye opens as you draw close, lights like distant galaxies swimming inside the pupil, and you flinch as the pressure of its alien regard returns. It feels like it’s prising open your skull to peer inside, but this time, the blinding migraine throb of it is almost welcome. 

_Where?_ it asks, _Daughter-of-my-lineage-where,_ and you pour out your mind to it in reply.

_She’s dead, OK? She’s fucking dead. I failed._

Silence follows, like the building pressure before a storm breaks. Something in the sky twists, or the sky itself does, opening along edges that didn’t used to be there, and your mind is caught by the slow, surreal motion of one the horrorterror’s arms unfurling. You’re expecting it to catch you up, pull you in to crush or devour you, and all you can force yourself to feel in response is a heavy grey blankness. But when it moves next, it moves fast, and not in your direction. It slams down like a knife through the heart of the city, past terraces and towers, beneath shattering streets and into to the core. You fly after as fast as you can, wondering – is it anger? Some incomprehensible punishment? All you know is that you made a mistake, and now someone else is going to pay for it. 

_You fucked up,_ the rhythm of your thoughts runs. You fucked up, and when you reach the moon’s center, the hollow chamber is cracked wide, and something in you cracks too at the sight of a single thorned tentacle piercing through Aradia’s thorax and the stone slab beneath. You notice it withdraw, coiling back into the sky, but you barely care, beyond the knowledge that you’ll burn yourself out trying to kill the thing it belongs to once the rest of what you need to do is over. Your flight falters. You hit the ground hard, and stumble up and over to her, cursing incoherently as you grasp for her hand and press your bowed head against it.

You’re not sure how long it takes you to realize that something is happening. It’s the change in the air that alerts you, the wind blowing in from the void, filling the block with a thrumming energy entirely different from your own. You open your eyes, and stop, and stare. What you’re seeing isn’t possible.

Aradia floats a few inches above the stone. Her long hair drifts around her, tugged by chaotic breezes, and her claws uncurl as if in easy sleep. She doesn’t look dead, or in pain, and what’s pouring from her wound isn’t blood. It’s ruddy light.

==> Aradia: Ascend

You open your eyes.

You have eyes to open, a free arm to push yourself up from the grave slab you’ve been lying on, a hand to feel the cold of the stone and nerves to transmit the sensation to your exuberant and ticking thinkpan. You have blood in your veins, rich rust, warm with life.

Sollux is there, gripping your other hand as he kneels in front of you. He says your name, and you grin at him, feeling muscles stretch in a face that you reach up to relearn by touch. It feels so good to smile, after so long in a muted world. He doesn’t grin back – he looks tired, you think, and stunned – but he throws his arms around you, and all you can do is hold him until he’s ready to smile again.

It’s hard to focus on that, though, when you know he’s fine or will be. You can feel the gears of the universe turning around you. It’s a brilliant mechanism. You want to dismantle it just to see how it works, and how it breaks, and how you can put it back together differently. 

You’ll have time for that later, you decide, and so much else besides. If there’s one thing you have in abundance, it’s time.

==> Sollux: Wait

Aradia’s alive.

She’s near as tall as you are now, and she holds you with a strength you’d almost forgotten she possessed. She has wings. For some reason, _that’s_ the detail that sticks in your mind – that after you and Karkat and Tavros, it turns out she’s a mutant too. Good thing that doesn’t matter now. The Empress is dead. She has no successor. You rest your head on Aradia’s shoulder, afraid to let her go lest she disappear again. Somewhere above you, chess guys are scrambling on high alert, trying to figure out what the hell just happened to their city. You’d feel sorry for them, but you don’t think any were hurt, so they can deal.

Aradia’s alive. Feferi isn’t. It’s exactly the kind of shit joke the universe likes to play, and your pan hurts too much to figure out what you feel right now; grief and joy and relief superimpose like competing wavelengths, and all of them are just noise, but the cracked slab that held Aradia’s dream-self is blurred when you look at it, so you think you must be crying.

The next thing you’re aware of is the crackle of static around the tips of your horns and the ache behind your eyes as the atmosphere in the block grows heavier. Aradia doesn’t stop holding you, but you feel her go still, like all her attention is suddenly elsewhere. You pull away enough to see what’s happening, and she shifts, looking up through the crack in the ceiling. It doesn’t take a genius to guess what’s looking back.

“Is that so?” she says, unaccountably cheerful and perfectly unrattled. “Well. I’ll see what I can do.”

==> Feferi: Fall

In the depths of a dream ocean, you taste Tyrian blood for the first and last time. 

It’s your blood, but it might as well be your Ancestor’s, because nobody’s coming back from this. Not her. Not you. You’ve wounded her irrevocably, and now you grip her arms and drag her down with you as you fall. Your lusus’s myriad arms rise to catch you in something like an embrace. You’ll let her consume you both, and that will be an end to this.

Above you, a red light blooms and grows in the distance. Time stutters, slows and thickens around you like amber. There’s a taste in the water like dust and old bone. You wonder with detached curiosity if this is what it’s like to die: nothing terrible, nothing wonderful, just the universe gradually easing to a gentle stop. The thought doesn’t bother you. You’re sorry you won’t get to meet Sollux again, or see what the Empire becomes when it’s an Empire no longer, but you’re tired now, and ready to sleep without dreaming.

The last thing you see before you close your eyes is two trolls backlit by crimson.

==> Aradia: Rewind

You’re not actually sure what you can do – not yet, not all of it – but you’re eager to find out.

So much has changed, and so little. It feels like something that’s been on the edge of your perception since the day you were hatched has burst into bold immediacy. Time and space are a possibility map laid open to your claws – not just here but everywhere, not just one path, but a multitude of them, branching and inextricable – and you can walk them forward _and_ back.

You narrow your thoughts, with effort, until you can hold in your thinkpan the tiny focus-point of the block you’re sitting in and the troll who’s sitting beside you, and through the gap between two instants you pull him sideways into a space where doom does not apply. It isn’t dark, but dark is how you experience it; there is no clockwork or music, but you experience both, a vibration that hums through your mind and body like horrorterror song. An ocean, you see, the place where all rivers flow, and from there you can slip into a different, shallower sea. You feel cold water wash over you, carrying the taste of salt and spilled blood; you watch a spirit laid to rest by someone else’s dying hand. You unturn the key in this universe’s mechanism, and the battle’s ending plays out in reverse, until you reach the last possible point of divergence.

The Condesce lunges. It is very, very easy to make sure that she’s too slow.

==> Feferi: Wake up

You return to consciousness in an unfamiliar place, with the phantom taste of seawater and blood still lingering in your mouth. 

The light is bright here, the air harsh. Your body is a thousand layered aches and bruises. You had a dream where you died, you think, and it still feels real. But now there’s a mediculler fussing about your cot, doing something with a saline drip attached to a tube in your arm, and you breathe and lie still, feeling cool clean sheets beneath you, trying to assess the danger. The mediculler looks your age. You’re aware from the glow of her skin that she might have looked your age for a while. But there’s no Imperial insignia on her uniform, and the Empire culls rainbow drinkers and doesn’t let adult jades out of the Caverns anyway, which means –

Memory comes flooding back. You’re safe. That’s the important part, even if you have no weapon in reach and you’ve traded killing tension for adrenaline shakes. The rest can wait until you’re ready to deal with it.

You watch the mediculler at her work, letting yourself be soothed by the motion and efficiency of her hands. If everything you’ve seen in movies is accurate, which you realize it probably isn’t, there’s a good chance that she knows from the moment you open your eyes that you’re awake. She still finishes hanging the IV before she turns to you, briskly but not unkindly.

“You must forgive our present state of disarray,” she says, in the tone of someone who has experienced a very strange and tiring night that isn’t over yet. “We have experienced something of an unexpected reunion.”

“I sea,” you say. You don’t, really, and there doesn’t seem to be much disarray in evidence, but you’re in no mood to argue.

“How are you feeling?”

“Alive,” you say. It’s a word that encompasses a lot, and only some of it is pain. The mediculler smiles in a way that doesn’t seem forced.

“I can inform you with some authority that it beats the alternative.”

“Can I leave?” You don’t intend the rising sharpness in your voice, the hint of threat. It’s there anyway.

“You’re not a prisoner,” the mediculler says. “You are, however, malnourished and recuperating, so I don’t recommend it yet. Quite aside from that, we’re in space.”

Yes. You do recall that being the case. You hear yourself laugh, even though it’s not _reelly_ all that funny, and realize that the mediculler is looking at you with some concern.

“We cannot give you free run of the ship,” she continues. “I do not anticipate you’ll have any difficulty understanding why. But there are common areas, and a private cabin set aside for you if you’d prefer to recover there.”

Which leaves you both trapped and free, grateful and angry at once. It’s a dual state that you expect Sollux could appreciate, or at least understand, and the thought of that steadies you a little. You wonder what you are to each other, now that you’re not allies in a common fight – unless you still are. You think that you could be, if you wanted. 

You ask where he is, and the mediculler smiles again. “Waiting outside, last time I checked. Should I tell him you’re awake?”

“No,” you say. “Take me out to meet him.” 

You’re not sure whether or not she will, or what you’ll do if she doesn’t. You don’t really care about ordering people around, but you don’t think you can force yourself to stay here; it’s possible she realizes that, because she gives you a long, searching look, then nods. She slips the IV line out and neatly bandages your arm, then offers you hers to lean on as she leads you to the door. You don’t need the help, but you accept the courtesy anyway.

Outside, as it happens, means sitting against the wall of the passageway opposite with a husktop balanced on his knees. There’s another troll at his side, one that you remember dimly but can’t quite place: wild curls spilling over her shoulders, heavy ram’s horns, smiling lips painted a rust that reminds you of the light you saw at the end of your dream, before your Ancestor died by your hand. She and Sollux are talking quietly, but when she notices you, she leans over to whisper one last thing, gives you a broad and almost conspiratorial grin, then hurries off like she’s got urgent business elsewhere. She doesn’t seem particularly impressed by station. It’s hard not to like her for that alone.

Sollux stands more slowly, shutting his husktop with a click, and looks more uncertain. You feel uncertain too, shy in a way you never were on the shore of your dream ocean. Maybe it’s because there’s less danger here, or maybe it’s just that everything seems more real.

“Hey,” he says, and shrugs one shoulder, too casual to be anything but nervous. “I’m guessing the last thing you want right now is rest, and the second to last thing is a grand tour. Food?”

You’re not hungry yet. You think maybe you will be soon, but right now, you just feel stretched-thin and strange.

“Maybe just somewhere quiet,” you say.

“I can manage that,” he says. “Come on. You might even like this place.”

The rebel ship lacks the opulence of the _Condescension,_ but it’s big, and busy, its sparsely-decorated passages alive with trolls in uniform hurrying about on business you can’t guess. Some salute as Sollux leads you along, and some call out greetings or amiable insults, which he returns without offense. A few are cerulean or higher, some midbloods, some rust. It doesn’t seem to make a difference. You remember how even the nobility on your Ancestor’s ship made an art of studied silence and averted gaze, and an old weight inside your thoracic struts eases.

He takes you down a lift to the lower decks, past mealblocks and utilities and at last to a door near the end of a long hall, which opens to a rapidly keyed-in code. Inside, it’s green. Not sea green, but chlorophyll green, made all the more vivid by sunlamps set to survivable intensity and an atmosphere rich with plant life, fresh water and damp soil. The block is small – it’s a greenhive on a spaceship, not a park – but the sheer number of above-water plants give it the impression of being larger than it is.

Sollux floats over to take a seat on an upturned plastic crate between two planters, and waves you over to join him. Humidity washes over you, soothing to your throat and your gills.

“Is this yours?” you ask, fascinated. You assume he had input into the colors, if nothing else; the planters are filled with starlike red and blue blossoms, their petals velvety beneath your touch.

“Eh,” he says. “Nature’s not my thing. But KN likes flowers and the bees need them, and my servers need the bees, so. Anyway, AA said you might go for a change of scenery that’s not tech and not water, and – hey, check this out.”

He holds out his hand, and there’s a pulse of psionic energy so subtle you barely feel it. A moment later, a bee lands on the bony ridge of his knuckles: a tiny life, crafted in perfect, jeweled purple. It does a little bee dance on the back of his hand while he grins like a doofy wiggler, his fangs tugging at one corner of his mouth, and – it’s cute, you think. It’s been too long since you thought that about anything. You’re reminded of your cuttlefish, before they escaped into the blue of Alternia’s oceans. You gave up on catching them long ago, when you realized that wild things needed to stay wild, but bees are different. You don’t cage them to care for them. You just give them a garden and a space to live.

“The Empire’s going to need rebuilding,” you say. “Or the – whatever it is now.”

“Yeah,” he says. The bee crawls up his finger, then buzzes off to resume its business among the planters, and it doesn’t bother you to see it go. His hand hangs there afterward like he’s forgotten it exists, until you catch it out of the air. That startles him for a moment, and his face floods with color – but he doesn’t seem surprised when you press a kiss to his fingertips like a promise, or when you say, “I want to help.”


End file.
